In July 1969, an article by Henrik Beer—a prominent figure within the international Red Cross movement—appeared in the Soviet Red Cross’s magazine.Footnote 1 Beer’s article provided an extended history of the League of Red Cross Societies (hereafter the League), a Geneva-based international organisation responsible for encouraging the formation of national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies worldwide, as well as supporting and coordinating their humanitarian activities.Footnote 2 In the article, Beer, who served as the League’s Secretary General from 1960–81, expressed deep admiration for the Soviet Red Cross. ‘Your society, with its huge reserve of activists, represents one of the most powerful units of the League’, he noted, before listing the Soviet Red Cross’ numerous material, technical, educational, and financial contributions to the international Red Cross movement.Footnote 3 There is no way of knowing whether journalists distorted Beer’s words when translating them into Russian, but the article was nevertheless emblematic of the mutually beneficial partnership that developed between the leadership of the Soviet Red Cross and the League across the second half of the twentieth century. This article examines the challenges and opportunities of this partnership at a time when decolonisation reconfigured the world map, Soviet foreign policy, and the composition of international organisations.
The partnership between the League and the Soviet Red Cross was possible because both sides had something to gain. For the League, their relationship with a major power in the socialist world opened channels to deliver humanitarian aid to conflict zones and facilitated the organisation’s adherence to the Red Cross fundamental principle of neutrality in the divided Cold War world. For the Soviet side, playing an important role in a major multilateral humanitarian network advanced propaganda narratives about the USSR’s leading role in global health and humanitarianism to international and domestic audiences. Beyond this, the partnership worked because the League and the Soviet Red Cross shared a utopian, future-facing vision of humanitarianism centred on development in the Global South. As newly independent states arose out of the dissolution of colonial empires in the 1950s–1970s, their socioeconomic development became high on the agendas of international organisations and national governments alike, who attempted to export their development models of economic and social life to the decolonising world.Footnote 4 Decolonisation reconfigured international organisations, as dozens of new governments in Africa and Asia became members of supranational bodies like the United Nations (UN), World Health Organization (WHO), and the League.Footnote 5 Within this context, the League launched its own Development Programme, a funding scheme made up of contributions from national societies to provide technical, financial, and material assistance to new Red Cross and Red Crescent societies in the Global South.Footnote 6 Although the League’s Development Programme was directed by a non-communist organisation, it fit neatly with Soviet visions of development that prioritised the development of large-scale infrastructure, the public sector, and welfare systems over strengthening the private sector.Footnote 7 As with the UN and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the Soviet Red Cross’s and League’s enmeshed internationalist visions enabled the two organisations to forge a mutually beneficial relationship.Footnote 8
In exploring the partnership forged between the League and the Soviet Red Cross, this article contributes a new perspective to the history of global health that emphasises the importance of collaboration and mutual benefit. Recent global health histories have tended to focus on disease control, or privilege the perspectives of Western powers and the work of Western-dominated organisations and institutions.Footnote 9 Innovative studies have pushed beyond these frameworks to emphasise the contributions of the socialist world.Footnote 10 Building upon this scholarship, this article demonstrates that just as socialist powers tapped into multilateral networks and international organisations to meet their goals in the field of medical diplomacy, international organisations also relied upon socialist channels to deliver medical aid and health care. In focusing on collaboration between a socialist state and an international organisation, the article responds to a recent call to excavate the ‘missing pieces’ in narratives on the development of global health and integrate the socialist world into global health history.Footnote 11
Stalin’s death in 1953 generated a distinctive shift in Soviet foreign policy. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Soviet leadership shifted away from Stalinist isolationism towards peaceful coexistence, knowledge transfer, and competition with the West, as well as the promotion of Soviet socialism in the decolonising and non-aligned world.Footnote 12 Another core component of this foreign policy reorientation was the reversal of the USSR’s temporary withdrawal from various international organisations. In 1954, the USSR reshaped its relationship with the United Nations by rejoining the International Labour Organization and becoming a full member of UNESCO.Footnote 13 From the early-1950s, the USSR became the second largest contributor to the UN’s budget.Footnote 14 In 1956, the USSR reactivated its membership to the WHO after a seven-year absence.Footnote 15 This embrace of international organisations extended into the world of the Red Cross. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviet Red Cross resumed contact with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) following decades of strained and complicated relations.Footnote 16 The Soviet Red Cross had been a member of the League of Red Cross Societies since 1934, but it was in the post-Stalin period that they began to play a more active and visible role in the organisation’s governing bodies. In 1957, Soviet Red Cross chairman Grigorii Miterev became the League’s Vice President, a role which he served in until 1971. Under Miterev’s leadership, the Soviet Red Cross became an important national society within the League.
Soviet internationalism has become a rich and developing field of study in recent years. Scholars have explored the cultural, economic, social, and political impact of the USSR’s engagements in Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa on both the Soviet Union and various recipient societies.Footnote 17 As Elizabeth Banks notes in a recent article, histories of Soviet internationalism have not devoted sufficient attention to the presence of Soviet ideas and practices in multilateral initiatives, networks, and organisations.Footnote 18 The important exceptions to this rule have concentrated on the USSR’s engagement with a handful of UN agencies and the role played by Soviet experts in the development of international law.Footnote 19 Medicine and health care are almost entirely absent from histories of post-war Soviet internationalism, even though the socialist world (and particularly the USSR) played a prominent role in the politics and practices of global health in the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote 20 In focusing on the Soviet Red Cross’s international activities, this article offers insight both into Soviet medical internationalism and the USSR’s engagement in the multilateral humanitarian networks that sought to transcend the geopolitical divisions of the Cold War world.
Focusing on Soviet engagements with the League is part of a historiographical shift in the history of internationalism to ‘history in-between’, which weaves ‘international politics into national contexts and individual, local experiences’.Footnote 21 This approach helps to nuance the history of the international Red Cross movement, which has so far privileged Western perspectives and has tended to bypass the contributions of the socialist world altogether.Footnote 22 Examining the League’s relationship with a major socialist Red Cross society helps us to better understand the organisation’s ‘capacity to evolve’ in the face of political upheaval, war, and humanitarian disaster, as well as the League’s ability to collaborate across Cold War divisions.Footnote 23
In order to explore the relationship between the Soviet Red Cross and the League, this article draws upon material from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and ICRC archives in Geneva, as well as Soviet Red Cross reports held in Estonian, Latvian, Moldovan, Russian, and Ukrainian archives and publications produced by members of the organisation’s Executive Committee. While this source base offers insight into the shared vision of the two organisations and the challenges of their collaboration, it is skewed towards the perspectives of a small minority of powerful elites based in Moscow and Geneva. Leadership of the Soviet Red Cross was comprised of trusted members of the country’s de facto elite (nomenklatura). The position of chairperson of the Soviet Red Cross was always held by a well-respected academician who had previously occupied prestigious high-level positions within the Soviet bureaucracy. For example, Grigorii Miterev served as the USSR’s Minister of Health and Nadezhda Troyan was a decorated war veteran and former partisan intelligence officer who headed the Scientific Research Institute of Health Education. The Soviet Red Cross had tens of millions of members, but directly participating in the League’s activities was the prerogative of only a tiny minority who possessed the biography and political connections required to access privileges that were denied to the vast majority of Soviet citizens, such as international travel and frequent contact with foreigners.
The partnership between the League and the Soviet Red Cross was simultaneously productive for both parties and fraught with seemingly irreconcilable tensions. In order to trace the contours of the relationship, the article begins by examining how both the Soviet Red Cross and the League navigated the political and economic barriers to the USSR’s participation in the international Red Cross movement. Focus then shifts onto two key moments of collaboration that hold broader significance to histories of global health and humanitarianism: the Vietnam War and the International Red Cross Seminar on Primary Health Care for Developing Countries, which was held in Frunze (now Bishkek), the capital of the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) in 1979. In the final section, the article explores how the Soviet Red Cross’s engagements with Geneva were presented to a domestic audience, focusing specifically on how participation in the League was instrumentalised to solidify Soviet racial hierarchies and advance narratives about the USSR’s superiority on the global stage.
Divergent goals? The international Red Cross movement meets the Soviet system
The Soviet Red Cross’s participation in the international Red Cross movement was at times rather complicated. While the Soviet Red Cross’s membership was mainly comprised of unpaid volunteers, the organisation itself was extremely closely linked to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and embedded within state structures. The Central Committee of the CPSU chose the leadership of the Soviet Red Cross, tightly controlled its budget, and retained the right to veto the organisation’s planned international activities. The CPSU even embedded KGB officers within the Soviet Red Cross, such as Ivan Teterin, who acted as a Soviet Red Cross representative in Geneva and Thailand during the late 1970s and early 1980s.Footnote 24 Therefore, the Soviet Red Cross’s engagements in the international Red Cross movement were inflected by the broader foreign policy goals of the CPSU, and Soviet Red Cross representatives were expected to advance the aims of their government, just like their counterparts in other non-communist international organisations.Footnote 25
Beyond the Soviet Red Cross’s close links with the CPSU, tensions between the organisation and the League also reflected their vastly different visions of the international Red Cross movement. The League professed that its work was guided by a series of fundamental principles (humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence from national government, voluntary service, unity, and universality), and the organisation’s activities were supposed to be conducted without racial, political, and religious prejudice.Footnote 26 There was often a disconnect between the League’s theoretical visions of its mission and its operations in practice. The League often conflated humanitarian aid with Western conceptions of development assistance, undermined the autonomy of national societies in the developing world, and served to reinforce divisions between the Global North and Global South.Footnote 27 Just like other international organisations, the League offered opportunities for former imperial powers and powerful nations in the Global North to retain influence over the Global South through humanitarian practices and initiatives.Footnote 28
In contrast to the League, Soviet Red Cross leadership did not profess to be neutral and actively sought to increase the influence of socialist national societies within the League. The Soviet Red Cross regularly met with the leaders of other socialist national societies to draft joint statements on international issues, encourage tactical voting for League leadership positions, and to develop unified stances ahead of international Red Cross conferences. When the Soviets felt that they were not being included as an equal partner within the League’s governing bodies, they accused the League of pro-Western bias. This accusation was levelled at League Secretary General Henrik Beer in May 1965 when he rejected the nomination of a Soviet candidate for a position in the League’s Secretariat because of budgetary concerns.Footnote 29 This response enraged Soviet Red Cross chairman Grigorii Miterev, who penned a scathing letter accusing the organisation of pro-Western bias. ‘Your conception of cooperation actually turns into the cooperation exclusively with the western countries, from where you bring leading officers to the League, its consultants and its experts [sic]’, Miterev wrote, before threatening to reduce the Soviet Red Cross’s financial contribution.Footnote 30 Beer pushed back strongly against these accusations and mentioned the appointment of representatives from Yugoslavia, Poland, Bulgaria, and the GDR to prominent positions.
Unlike the League, the Soviet Red Cross were proudly political and often criticised national governments deemed to be ‘unfriendly’ for what they perceived to be the broader success of the international Red Cross movement. Soviet Red Cross leadership regarded the League as a powerful organisation with the ability to influence national governments and frequently criticised the League’s leadership for failing to take a strong enough stance on a number of international issues, including apartheid in South Africa, Chinese and US military intervention in Vietnam, and the deployment of nuclear weapons in Europe.Footnote 31 Although the Soviet Red Cross often regarded the fundamental principle of neutrality as an impediment to the broader success of the international Red Cross movement, they also benefitted from the same neutrality when it came to the aggressive foreign policy of their own government in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan. After the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, League General Secretary Henrik Beer reassured Miterev that the issue would not be raised at the next meeting of the League’s Executive Committee because they would ‘stick to the non-political character of the Red Cross’.Footnote 32 Similarly, the Soviet Red Cross praised the ICRC’s ‘objective position’ on Afghanistan in a 1980 report.Footnote 33
The Soviet Red Cross’s political stance generated tension between Moscow and Geneva. While Beer often expressed sympathy for the organisation’s position on international issues, he issued numerous firm reminders about the non-political nature of the Red Cross movement.Footnote 34 Others were less sympathetic and resorted to personal insults. In confidential notes on an April 1979 meeting with Soviet Red Cross leadership, the ICRC’s regional delegate for Europe, Philippe Grand d’Hauteville, accused the Soviets of regarding the ICRC as nothing more than ‘a megaphone intended to carry the voice of Moscow-style Marxist-Leninism into the international arena of the Red Cross’.Footnote 35 Grand d’Hauteville claimed to find dialogue with the Soviet Red Cross challenging, not only because of their ‘political opinions’ but also because of the apparent ‘limited intellectual and cultural background of [the organisation’s] representatives’.
The League and the Soviet Red Cross also had different perceptions about Red Cross membership. From the Soviet side, the Red Cross was a mass movement: in 1970 the organisation claimed to have 84.5 million members, a figure which accounted for around 35 per cent of the country’s population.Footnote 36 Like many aspects of social, political, and economic life, Red Cross membership was centrally planned in Moscow and republican Red Cross and Red Crescent committees were expected to meet membership targets dictated by the centre.Footnote 37 It is perhaps because of these targets that the organisation had a very inclusive definition of membership, which included anybody who paid the extremely low membership fee or participated in any Red Cross activities, including blood donors, members of first aid teams, and schoolchildren. According to a briefing prepared by the League, becoming a member of the Soviet Red Cross involved merely paying the membership fee and did not necessarily require any regular commitment of time.Footnote 38
From the League’s side, being a Red Cross member involved making a financial contribution to the international Red Cross movement. Between 1969 and 1974, the League phased in a new scale of contributions for national societies which calculated contributions based upon a given society’s financial resources, their country’s gross national product (GNP), and the number of adult members.Footnote 39 This new scale of contributions put the Soviet Red Cross in a very difficult position. Chairwoman Nadezhda Troyan explained this in a letter to the League in July 1973, wherein she noted that the mass nature of the Soviet Red Cross did not necessarily make the organisation wealthy because membership contributions were paid in Soviet rubles and the organisation did not have its own hard currency (valiuta, stable foreign currency) account.Footnote 40 In order to reduce the Soviet Red Cross’s contributions, Troyan began reporting reduced membership figures to the League, something which she claimed the Red Cross societies of the GDR, Bulgaria, UK, and USA had also done.Footnote 41
The Soviet political and economic system also posed significant challenges. The Soviet Red Cross often appeared reluctant to meet its financial obligations to the League, especially when the latter requested an increased contribution. At the October 1952 meeting of the League’s Executive Committee, the Soviet Red Cross voted against a proposed increase in contributions and suggested that the League reduce its expenses rather than asking for more money.Footnote 42 The Soviet Red Cross continued to accuse the League of wasting money in the decades that followed. One tense exchange between the two parties prompted Beer to provide the Soviet Red Cross with a detailed overview of the League’s income and expenditure in June 1965.Footnote 43 From the League’s side, this tension was driven by fundamentally different understandings of money. In his notes from an August 1967 meeting with Miterev on the topic of finance, Beer expressed frustration at Miterev’s apparent ignorance about inflation and the necessity of an element of risk to yield return on investments. According to Beer, Miterev asked for the League to use a state bank and invest money ‘without any risks whatsoever’.Footnote 44 Miterev himself expressed his disapproval of the League’s purchasing of bonds and participation in stock exchange transactions at a League meeting in Geneva in April 1966.Footnote 45
Miterev’s concerns about the League’s expenditure may have reflected apprehension about investment in global financial markets, but it was also likely driven by practical circumstances. The Soviet Red Cross’s budget was comprised of state funding and membership dues, both of which were paid in Soviet rubles, a non-convertible currency that was excluded from global financial systems.Footnote 46 Contributions to the League were paid in Swiss Francs, but the Soviet Red Cross only had a limited hard currency budget that had to cover contributions to the ICRC, the exchange of Red Cross delegations, attendance at international events, and the delivery of aid overseas. In order to access hard currency, the Soviet Red Cross had to secure approval from the Central Committee of the CPSU and the USSR’s Council of Ministers, who on occasion flatly rejected requests.Footnote 47 Despite seeking greater representation within international organisations, the Soviet government took complicated measures to prevent handing over significant amounts of hard currency to them.Footnote 48
The League was aware of the Soviet Red Cross’s limited access to hard currency and tried to find solutions. In May 1964, Beer made an ‘exceptional concession’ and suggested that the Soviets paid part of their contribution in unconvertible rubles, but Soviet Red Cross leadership claimed that this would not work because it would have been impossible for them to receive permission from the government to open a dedicated account with a Soviet state bank for this purpose.Footnote 49 In March 1965, Miterev suggested that the Soviet Red Cross could pay part of its contribution in kind by supplying the League with materials and equipment that could be used to provide humanitarian relief.Footnote 50 The League readily accepted this proposal, and this became common practice in the decades that followed. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet Red Cross supplied the League with items that had been manufactured within the Soviet Union, including paper, medications, powdered milk, tents, and even riverboats that could be used by mobile medical teams in the Amazon.Footnote 51 This flexible arrangement was specific to the Soviet Red Cross, but it represented part of a broader increase in the circulation of Soviet materials in international development work that was driven by the weakness of the ruble. For example, the USSR paid its contributions to the UN in rubles, which were then used by UN officials to purchase Soviet materials, equipment, and expertise, which in turn increased Soviet influence over UN development work.Footnote 52
A mutually beneficial partnership
Despite the challenges posed by the USSR’s political and economic system, the Soviet Red Cross and the League worked flexibly together for mutual benefit. For the League, a relationship with a major power in the socialist world offered channels for delivering humanitarian aid to hard-to-reach conflict zones. For the Soviet Red Cross, engagement in the League served important propaganda purposes and provided legitimisation at both home and abroad. The Soviet Red Cross were also able to use the League’s global network of national societies to advance narratives about the superiority of the USSR’s health care system and development models to target audiences in the decolonising world.
During the Vietnam War, the Soviets provided both the League and the ICRC with essential channels of communication and transportation through which to reach the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, North Vietnam). The Soviet government had developed a close relationship with the DRV in the decade following the USSR’s official recognition of the country in 1950. In 1955, the Soviets sent an ambassador to the DRV and Ho Chi Minh made an official visit to the USSR.Footnote 53 By the late 1950s, the USSR was providing regular economic, technical, and military assistance in the form of both non-refundable aid and long-term credits.Footnote 54 USSR-DRV ties were further strengthened following the United States’s escalation of conflict in 1965. In this year, the USSR and DRV exchanged high-level delegations and the Soviets significantly increased economic aid, providing 594 million rubles in the period 1966–9 alone.Footnote 55 Alongside economic aid, Hanoi sent thousands of Vietnamese students to Soviet universities, technical colleges, and institutes to study a wide range of subjects, including architecture, art, medicine, and engineering.Footnote 56
The Soviet Red Cross participated in broader attempts to foster cooperation between the USSR and the DRV. In early 1956, the Soviet Red Cross sent a delegation to Hanoi to deliver a gift of 100,000 rubles to support victims of a recent devastating typhoon, meet with various state officials (including Ho Chi Minh), and develop plans to open a Soviet Red Cross hospital in the country.Footnote 57 The planned hospital was part of broader efforts on the part of socialist European states to assist in the construction of socialist healthcare in the DRV.Footnote 58 The Soviet Red Cross opened the 150-bed hospital in May 1956, which was staffed by Soviet doctors and nurses, as well as Vietnamese medical personnel.Footnote 59 The Soviet Red Cross ran the hospital for two years before it was officially handed over to the DRV Ministry of Health in 1958.Footnote 60
As well as material aid, the Soviet Red Cross were vocal supporters of the North Vietnamese within the international Red Cross movement. The DRV Red Cross society were frequent guests of the Soviet Red Cross and attended various events in the USSR, including a number of All-Union Red Cross conferences and international youth Red Cross events.Footnote 61 Throughout the 1960s, the Soviet Red Cross issued numerous public appeals detailing the atrocities of the US military in the DRV, calling on the US government to respect the Geneva Conventions, and imploring the ICRC and League to speak out against American aggression.Footnote 62 In December 1967, Soviet Red Cross chairman Miterev wrote a long and emotionally charged letter to the American Red Cross imploring them to speak out against the war and detailing the destruction wreaked on the DRV by American air raids.Footnote 63
Moral support for the North Vietnamese was not just offered by the leadership of the Soviet Red Cross. Instead, the organisation provided a channel for grassroots expressions of solidarity by ordinary members and, in doing so, became a participant in the broader international DRV solidarity campaigns that swept across state socialist Europe in this period.Footnote 64 The Soviet Red Cross’s magazine became another platform for the flood of propaganda against the Vietnam War that became so familiar to Soviet audiences throughout the late 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 65 One 1966 issue of the magazine included a message from schoolchildren in Grodno to their Vietnamese counterparts. ‘We, young activists of the Red Cross, together with the entire Soviet people, join our voices in protest and say, “Hands off Vietnam!”’, the appeal read, before reminding Vietnamese children that they would always be their ‘true friends’.Footnote 66
The Soviet Red Cross’s relationship with the North Vietnamese meant that the organisation could act as an intermediary for the League and ICRC, even during periods when Geneva-Hanoi relations were particularly frosty. Both the League and ICRC had attempted to provide assistance to victims of US bombing raids since 1965, but their offers had been declined or ignored by the DRV government and the National Liberation Front (NLF, Viet Cong).Footnote 67 The Soviet Red Cross helped to establish contact between the ICRC, the League and the NLF because the latter had a representative based in Moscow.Footnote 68 Both League and ICRC representatives met with the NLF while in the USSR to attend the Soviet Red Cross’s centenary conference in May 1967.Footnote 69
As well as acting as a mediator between the NLF and Geneva, the Soviet Red Cross were one of the main points of contact for coordinating and transporting humanitarian aid to the DRV. The ICRC sent shipments of medications to the NLF through Moscow from 1966.Footnote 70 The Soviet Red Cross assumed formal responsibility for shipping relief provided by the League to North Vietnam in summer 1967 and helped to transport 237,000 Swiss francs worth of materials and medication through Moscow by the end of that year.Footnote 71 A delegation from the Soviet Red Cross also visited the DRV’s Red Cross Society in late 1967 and reported back to the League on the urgent medical needs of the local population.Footnote 72 Beer made his first visit to Hanoi via Moscow in May 1969 to negotiate assistance to the North Vietnamese.Footnote 73 Beyond the ICRC and the League, the Soviet Red Cross helped other national societies ship humanitarian aid to the DRV through Vladivostok.Footnote 74
The North Vietnamese regarded the Soviet Red Cross as a reliable partner and sought their assistance in transferring aid from various countries to Hanoi. In February 1968, the NLF representative in Moscow asked the Soviet Red Cross to arrange the transportation of tonnes of medication from the Egyptian city of Alexandria to Odesa by ship and then on to Hanoi by aeroplane.Footnote 75 In September 1970, the ambassador of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam (the puppet government of the North Vietnamese) asked the Soviet Red Cross to help transport blood plasma from Berlin to Hanoi via Moscow.Footnote 76 The plasma had been donated to the Vietnamese by citizens of Britain and the GDR as part of broader solidarity campaigns centred around blood donation.Footnote 77 The GDR Red Cross agreed to transport a shipment of plasma to Moscow once a month, after which the Soviet Red Cross agreed to transport it by plane along the Moscow-Tashkent-Vientiane-Hanoi route. Within this context, Moscow became an important transit point for international solidarity initiatives and the Soviet Red Cross took on a central role in broader global efforts to ship relief to North Vietnam.
Vietnam was central to the USSR’s projection of itself as a global humanitarian leader, but this was just one of the many contributions that the Soviet Union made to the international Red Cross movement in this period. The Soviet Red Cross were enthusiastic participants in the League’s Development Programme from its inception in the early 1960s. The League regularly sought feedback from Soviet Red Cross leadership on the Programme’s planned activities during its initial stages and the Soviets regularly contributed money, materials, and expertise.Footnote 78 The Soviet Red Cross sent experts to numerous African countries on behalf of the League to gauge the needs of local national societies in order to tailor the Development Programme to meet them.Footnote 79 Whereas the Soviet Red Cross faced obstacles from their government when attempting to obtain additional funds for League activities, this was less of a problem when it came to the Development Programme. The League’s General Secretary Henrik Beer did not hide his surprise when the Soviets immediately promised to provide one million rubles (including 360,000 rubles in hard currency) to the Programme in 1965, despite recently complaining about their inability to access enough hard currency to pay their ordinary contributions to the League.Footnote 80
The Soviet Red Cross’s strong financial commitment was likely because the League’s Development Programme echoed Soviet visions of development in the Global South. In contrast to Western models of development, Soviet economic aid was focused on strengthening the public sector of the target country while channelling capital into the Soviet economy, which usually meant supporting large-scale industrial and infrastructural projects that drew upon Soviet materials and expertise.Footnote 81 The Soviet Red Cross too participated in overseas development initiatives, most notably through the construction of hospitals, training of medical personnel, and delivery of technical and material aid to national societies in the Global South. The bilaterial work of the Soviet Red Cross in this regard was recognised by the League as an important component of development. For example, the equipment and personnel given by the Soviet Red Cross to the Algerian-Soviet Friendship hospital in Lakhdaria was included in the League’s Development Programme for 1968.Footnote 82 Just like the USSR and the UN, the Soviet Red Cross and the League operated on the premise of shared ‘goals, modernist ideals, and aesthetics in development work’, which made Soviet participation in a non-communist organisation possible.Footnote 83
The Soviet Red Cross leaned into the links between the Development Programme and the Soviet government’s foreign policy goals when pushing for additional funding for their League contributions. In a 1973 report prepared for the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Soviet Red Cross noted that the Soviets were severely lagging behind capitalist countries in their donations to the Development Programme and encouraged the Party to make funds available for an even bigger contribution, noting that the Programme was an ‘important channel for influencing, promoting, and strengthening [the Soviet Union’s] position in developing countries’.Footnote 84 Within this context, Soviet Red Cross leadership presented multilateral engagement within a humanitarian organisation like the League as an important diplomatic channel for increasing Soviet influence in the Global South.
The Soviet Red Cross also provided the League with the resources, manpower, and importantly, the enthusiasm required to organise large international seminars, workshops, and conferences. The League and the Soviet Red Cross co-organised a Red Cross seminar on blood donation as part of the 12th International Congress on Blood Transfusion that took place in Moscow in August 1969. The seminar was funded by the Soviet Red Cross and was attended by participants from twenty-three countries, including representatives of the United States, Belgian, Czechoslovakian, Finnish, French, Greek, Hungarian, Ivory Coast, Japanese, Dutch, Peruvian, and Philippine Red Cross societies.Footnote 85 The Soviet Red Cross also hosted numerous international events for junior Red Cross volunteers, including the 1965 International Red Cross meeting held at the Artek Youth camp in Crimea and the International Red Cross Youth Conference of 1971 in Moscow.Footnote 86
In May 1979, the Soviet Red Cross and the League co-hosted the International Red Cross Seminar on Primary Health Care for the Developing Countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America in Frunze, the capital of the Kyrgyz SSR. The seminar was a follow-up event held one year after the momentous 1978 International Conference on Primary Health Care, convened in Alma-Ata in the Kazakh SSR by the WHO and UNICEF. Unlike Alma-Ata, the Frunze seminar was geared specifically towards countries in the Global South with the explicit goal of helping new national societies implement primary health care programmes.Footnote 87 Seventy-six national societies attended the 1979 seminar and the stakes of the event were high for both co-hosts. For the League, Frunze presented the chance to showcase the key role of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies in delivering primary health care worldwide, a topic that had not been paid sufficient attention at Alma-Ata.Footnote 88 For the Soviets, Frunze offered opportunities to correct mistakes made at Alma-Ata in 1978, specifically the central government and media’s failure to promote the landmark event, respond adequately to criticism levelled against the Soviet health care system, and highlight what they regarded as the Soviet origins of primary health care.
In organising the Frunze seminar, the League and the Soviet Red Cross had to work together flexibly to navigate the political constraints under which the latter organisation operated. During the planning stage, the League took issue with the Soviet invite list because it excluded a ‘considerable number’ of national societies from the Global South and included many from socialist Eastern Europe, despite the event being organised specifically for ‘developing’ countries.Footnote 89 The rigidly centralised foreign policy of the Soviet Union meant that those at the highest ranks of Soviet Red Cross—just like their counterparts in other international organisations like the WHO—could not invite delegates without the explicit approval of the highest-level Soviet governing bodies.Footnote 90 The Soviet Red Cross told the League in confidence that they could not obtain permission from their government to invite representatives from ‘unfriendly’ countries with whom they did not have diplomatic relations, such as Chile, South Africa, and South Korea.Footnote 91 Nevertheless, Henrik Beer asked the Soviet Red Cross chairman Valerii Baltiiskii to revise their invite list to include all national societies that were members of the League. Here, the Soviet Red Cross had to walk a tightrope between the League’s demands for universality and the foreign policy priorities of the Soviet government.
The Frunze seminar went ahead so we can assume that the Soviets and the League came to an agreement on the attendance issue. Perhaps the Soviet government made concessions because the Frunze seminar explicitly focused on the Global South and was therefore oriented towards their broader foreign policy goals. From the mid-1950s onwards, the Soviet government began to reengage with the Global South, driven by a mixture of anti-imperialist sentiments and a desire to convince elites of newly independent countries to adopt socialist development models.Footnote 92 A substantial portion of this engagement was channelled through the so-called Soviet South, and the republics of Central Asia and the Caucasus were instrumentalised to advance narratives about Moscow’s commitment to anti-colonialism, championing of national cultures, tolerance of religion, and the achievements of Soviet development to an international audience.Footnote 93 The Central Asian republics (and especially Uzbekistan) were heralded by Soviet leadership as successful examples of the meshing of socialism with traditional cultures and therefore models for Global South countries emerging upon the landscape of the new postcolonial world order.Footnote 94 Within this context, culture and science became increasingly important tools of diplomacy and channels for fostering connections between countries in the Global South and Soviet Central Asia.Footnote 95
Health care was an integral component of Soviet South-Global South engagement. The Soviets had selected Alma-Ata as the location of the 1978 conference because it presented opportunities to advance narratives about the modernising impulses of the Soviet health care system and ‘display “health and development” activities germane to the majority of WHO member states’.Footnote 96 Similarly, when the Soviet Red Cross organised a UNICEF seminar on child welfare in the USSR in 1967, the Uzbek SSR was chosen as the best location to display ‘the successes [of the Soviet system] that have been achieved in conditions similar to those in Asia and Africa’.Footnote 97 The Soviet Red Cross saw the 1979 Frunze seminar as serving a dual purpose: to determine the role of the Red Cross in delivering primary health care globally and to demonstrate ‘the achievements of the Kyrgyz SSR in the construction of socialism and the socialist health care system’.Footnote 98 Alongside panels and roundtables, the seminar’s programme included visits to factories, medical institutions, and schools in the cities of Frunze and Osh, as well as rural regions of the Kyrgyz SSR, where delegates met with and observed the work of local Red Cross committees.Footnote 99 Illustrated trilingual (Kyrgyz, Russian, English) informational booklets on the work of regional Kyrgyz Red Cross committees were also published and distributed to seminar participants.Footnote 100
The Frunze seminar gave Soviet officials opportunities to advance claims about the superiority of the Soviet system to their target audience in the Global South, while also addressing criticisms of their health care system that had arisen at Alma-Ata. During the preparations for Alma-Ata and even at the conference itself, Western proponents of primary health care—including the WHO Director-General—had critiqued Soviet health care as overly medicalised and centralised, something which they believed prevented community participation.Footnote 101 The Frunze seminar allowed the Soviets to showcase the community-driven aspects of the health care system that were primarily delivered by Soviet Red Cross and Red Crescent committees. Local branches trained millions of people as first aiders and at-home carers for people with disabilities and the elderly. Individuals then put this training to use and became part-time volunteer carers or joined voluntary first aid teams at their educational institutions, industrial enterprises, schools, and state/collective farms, which were known as sanitary squads (sanitarnye druzhiny) and sanitary posts (sanitarnye posty). In his speech at the Frunze seminar, Soviet Red Cross chairman Baltiiskii explained the centrality of Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers to the functioning of the country’s health care system. Not only did Soviet volunteers deliver first aid and assist in disaster relief efforts following floods and earthquakes, but they also cared for the elderly and disabled and were active participations in environmental protection efforts.Footnote 102
Alma-Ata received lukewarm coverage in the Soviet press and no high-level Party functionaries or diplomats attended the conference. This was likely because it was primarily organised by the Western-dominated WHO, which was only marginally important to Soviet visions of international collaboration in the field of health care.Footnote 103 In contrast, Frunze was attended by Aleksei Kosygin—a member of the Politburo and prominent Soviet statesman—and numerous articles on the event appeared in central and regional newspapers.Footnote 104 Parts of the seminar were aired on republican television and the All-Union television programme Vremiia (Time), and the latter’s film crew prepared a fifteen-minute film on the event entitled The Soviet Union in the Eyes of Foreign Guests.Footnote 105 The Soviet Red Cross magazine dedicated an entire issue to the seminar, which included dozens of photographs, reports on seminar activities, and articles written by representatives of the League, WHO, UNICEF, and Kyrgyz Communist Party, as well as interviews with delegates from various countries, including Costa Rica, Cuba, India, Vietnam, and Zambia.Footnote 106 The increased attention on the Frunze event was likely because the Soviet government regarded the League as a useful international organisation for meeting their foreign policy goals. The Soviet Red Cross consistently emphasised the fact that engagement in the League offered them opportunities to establish contact with Red Cross societies in the newly independent countries of the decolonising world, who came to dominate the League’s membership from the 1960s onwards.Footnote 107
Bringing Geneva home: Soviet internationalism for a domestic audience
The Soviet Red Cross’s various engagements with the League and their participation in the international Red Cross movement served an important domestic function and were used by the organisation’s leadership to advance narratives about the USSR’s leading role in global humanitarian politics to its vast reserve of volunteers. This framing reflected the hierarchical nature of Soviet internationalism, wherein the Soviet Union was placed in a dominant position as the arbiter of internationalist initiatives or projects.Footnote 108 Beyond this, Soviet Red Cross leadership encouraged their volunteers to regard themselves as part of a global international community of humanitarians with a shared history. The celebration of Soviet achievements all while fostering visions of a global community that cut across political divisions reveals the complex interplay between national pride and internationalist values that underwrote Soviet post-war internationalism.Footnote 109
The primary vehicle for advancing these narratives was the Soviet Red Cross magazine, Sovetskii Krasnyi Krest, a lively illustrated periodical that published news and articles on the activities of the Soviet Red Cross across the various republics and regions of the USSR. The magazine also published letters from readers, cartoons, and photographs, held competitions for best stories, posters, and articles, reported on Red Cross events within and beyond the Soviet Union, and introduced its readers to international branches of the Red Cross around the world. By 1964, the journal had just over 111,000 subscribers and by 1967 circulation had reached 260,000.Footnote 110 In 1969, the magazine doubled its publication frequency to twelve issues per year.Footnote 111
Readers of Sovetskii Krasnyi Krest were constantly informed about the essential contributions that their national society made in discussions of the League’s Board of Governors. Soviet delegates within the League also placed themselves at the forefront of the global struggle for peace, claiming responsibility for starting off discussions that eventually led to adoption of the principles of humanity by the Council of Delegates in 1961 and the resolution ‘The Red Cross as a Factor in World Peace’, adopted in Geneva in 1963.Footnote 112 When the League and ICRC were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963, the Soviet Red Cross celebrated this as their victory, noting ‘with particular satisfaction that the Peace Prize has been awarded to an international organisation in whose activities it takes such an active part’.Footnote 113
Discussions of the League also offered opportunities to construct a hierarchy of humanitarianism that benefitted the USSR. One article on the League’s history and activities published in Sovetskii Krasnyi Krest drew sharp divisions between the work of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies in capitalist and socialist countries. The author claimed that Red Cross work was more significant in socialist countries because national societies tended to collaborate with their respective health authorities, whereas in capitalist countries socio-medical programmes tended to take on a more ‘philanthropic character’, meaning relying on funding from private donors.Footnote 114 Readers of the article would have immediately recognised ‘philanthropic’ as negative, given that charity was used only in reference to ‘bourgeois’ societies in Soviet public discourse.Footnote 115 In dismissing Red Cross work as ‘philanthropic’ in capitalist countries, the Soviet Red Cross presented socialist humanitarianism as something distinct from, and superior to, capitalist humanitarianism.
Visits of the leaders of the League to the USSR also served as an opportunity to present the Soviet Red Cross—and the Soviet Union in general—as a key player in international humanitarianism and global health politics. In 1962, the League’s General Secretary Henrik Beer visited Moscow, as well as the Latvian and Uzbek SSRs (Figure 1). A correspondent from Sovetskii Krasnyi Krest interviewed the so-called ‘guest from Geneva’ just before he left the country and the interview was published in the magazine shortly after.Footnote 116 Beer apparently praised the USSR’s ‘new economic successes’ and disease prevention efforts in collective farms and factories, as well as the ‘impressive’ development of what he referred to as the ‘previously very backward’ region of Central Asia. Here, he repeated longstanding Orientalist tropes that were common in Soviet public discourse and rooted in Soviet racial hierarchies, which placed European and Slavic peoples in a dominant position and presented people from southern and eastern regions as in need of modernisation.Footnote 117 Beer continued in this vein in commenting that the Soviet development of Central Asia could serve as an example for the newly independent countries of the decolonising world, and by remarking that ‘before my trip to the USSR, it seemed to me that every citizen mastering sanitary knowledge was a distant ideal. But when I came to your country, I saw that this ideal was being realized’.
Henrik Beer with Red Cross volunteers at the Tashkent Textile Kombinat (top) and with junior Red Cross members at a school in the Red Uzbekistan collective farm (bottom), during his visit to the Uzbek SSR in summer 1962. IFRC Archives, box R509626484, Visite de Beer, 1962.
Given that a transcript of the interview does not exist, it is difficult to confirm whether the translator or the editors at Sovetskii Krasnyi Krest distorted Beer’s words to bring them into line with Soviet health propaganda. The IFRC Archives hold Beer’s notes on his 1962 trip to the Soviet Union, and his account mainly celebrates Tashkent’s multiculturalism, his appreciation of Uzbek food, and how impressed he was by the Uzbek SSR’s Red Crescent society. Beer’s account makes no mention of the region’s apparent ‘backwardness’ and instead remarked on the cultural achievements of the region’s inhabitants before Russian conquest in the nineteenth century, as well as the groundbreaking contributions of eleventh-century Islamic scholar and polymath Ibn Sina to the field of medicine.Footnote 118 Regardless of whether the Soviet Red Cross reported Beer’s impressions accurately or not, his visit provided the organisation with an opportunity to not only celebrate their achievements, but also to reinforce official narratives about the benefits of Soviet development in Central Asia, as well as the supremacy of Soviet socialism in the arena of global health.
Similarly, an interview appeared in the Soviet Red Cross’s magazine after the League’s President José Barroso visited the Soviet Union in 1967. As well as Moscow and Leningrad, Barroso’s trip also included a visit to Yerevan in the Armenian SSR, presumably with the intention of showcasing development in the Soviet South. Barroso apparently told the magazine that the Soviet Red Cross was the largest national society within the League and that its ‘activities were organised in the best possible way’. He also remarked that the Soviet Red Cross ought to be ‘properly represented on the League’s Executive Committee, on several of the advisory committees, and on the Permanent Commission of the International Red Cross’.Footnote 119 It is highly unlikely that Barroso said this, given that the League frequently pushed back against accusations of pro-Western bias and socialist under-representation. Only one part of Barroso’s interview included a verbatim statement in quotation marks, which was his expression of gratitude to Soviet Red Cross and to his hosts for their exceptional hospitality. Therefore, it is likely that the longer interview was edited to encourage readers to regard the Soviet Red Cross as one of the most important national societies in the world, an idea apparently legitimised by a prominent foreign visitor.
Beyond advancing narratives of Soviet supremacy, articles on the League’s activities encouraged Soviet Red Cross activists to regard themselves as part of a broader global community of humanitarians. One article reporting on the autumn 1964 meetings of the League’s Executive Committee explained to readers that the Soviet Red Cross’s main activities (such as first aid training, recruiting blood donors, and the training of nurses) were also carried out simultaneously by dozens of Red Cross and Red Crescent branches on different continents.Footnote 120 Readers were also informed that across the world, young volunteers were being taught the importance of ‘humanitarianism and international solidarity’, just like young Soviet Red Cross volunteers. Soviet volunteers were encouraged to regard the history of the international Red Cross movement as their shared history. A 1962 issue of Sovetskii Krasnyi Krest included a calendar celebrating the centenary of the International Red Cross and an infographic informing Soviet Red Cross volunteers that they were part of a community of 170 million people worldwide.Footnote 121 The back cover of a 1971 issue of Sovetskii Krasnyi Krest included a poster to celebrate World Red Cross and Red Crescent Day. Entitled ‘Round-the-clock action’, the poster reminded volunteers in the Soviet Union that ‘in every corner of the globe there are people—men and women, boys and girls—who are ready at any moment to respond to someone else’s misfortune … Activists of the Society are always on duty.’Footnote 122
Representations of the League also offered Soviet citizens a window to the world beyond the USSR. One article about the September 1959 meeting of the League’s Board of Governors in Athens included descriptions of ‘the blue sea, the hot capital, and the lively and freedom-loving Greek people’, as well as the wonders of the Ancient world that awed the Soviet delegates.Footnote 123 The write-up of another Board meeting in 1961 included long descriptions of ‘Golden Prague’ with its ‘warm, sunny weather, and lush golden foliage in gardens and parks’.Footnote 124 Sovetskii Krasnyi Krest’s coverage of the 1963 International Red Cross Congress opened with a poetic ode to Geneva:
Thousands of seagulls, like a snow-white cloud, circle over Lake Geneva and the blue Rhône. Swans majestically glide across the clear water. Whole flotillas of doves hurriedly scurry about. It seems like just a stone’s throw to the dazzling white of the crowning peak of Mont Blanc. Surrounded by mountains on three sides, Geneva is pushed towards the lake. Its boundless blue and slightly hazy expanse beckons.Footnote 125
These descriptions of the beautiful lands beyond the Soviet Union and the promotion of internationalism sat uneasily alongside the fact that most Soviet citizens were not permitted to travel abroad and generally had limited contact with foreigners. From 1955, a Soviet Central Committee resolution introduced the possibility of permitting Soviet citizens to temporarily leave the country, something which had long only been the purview of diplomats, trade officials, journalists, and cultural figures.Footnote 126 However, Soviet citizens had to be thorough vetted in order to travel, and securing permission to travel abroad depended upon officialdom’s assessment of their political reliability and moral qualities.Footnote 127 Despite rising numbers of Soviet tourists throughout the 1960s and 1970s, international travel was prohibitively expensive for most Soviet citizens.Footnote 128 The number of foreign visitors to the Soviet Union significantly increased in the same period, but international visitors tended to cluster in major cities like Moscow, Leningrad, and Kyiv.Footnote 129
Soviet Red Cross volunteers had greater opportunities than most in this regard, as republican branches of the organisation frequently hosted foreign delegations. When foreign national societies visited the USSR, they met with representatives of regional Red Cross committees, as well as Red Cross volunteers in industrial enterprises, collective farms, and universities. However, given Soviet officialdom’s anxieties regarding unregulated contact between Soviet citizens and foreigners, meeting foreign delegations was a privilege only granted to a select number of volunteers. The vast majority of the tens of millions of Soviet Red Cross members did not travel abroad or interact with foreigners, therefore their participation in the international Red Cross movement was principally through reading and writing in to Sovetskii Krasnyi Krest.
Nevertheless, discussions of the League in Sovetskii Krasnyi Krest encouraged Soviet volunteers to identify with a broader international community that transcended political divisions and linguistic barriers. Just as print culture encouraged the development of imagined national communities throughout the nineteenth century, discourse on international organisations like the UN, and also the Red Cross, functioned in a similar way throughout the twentieth century.Footnote 130 Just like with other international organisations, representations of the League offered Soviet citizens a ‘window open on the world’ that was ‘framed in visions of world governance, world civic duty, and international community’.Footnote 131 The League and the Soviet Red Cross shared a vision of internationalism that was future-focused, utopian, and rooted in the transfer of knowledge and skills in the field of health care. These shared visions created space for the Soviet Red Cross’s participation in the international Red Cross movement and made it possible to integrate the actions of volunteers in the USSR within the broader global movement. Soviet Red Cross volunteers celebrated World Red Cross Day on 8 May alongside millions of volunteers around the world. In the Estonian, Moldovan and Ukrainian SSRs throughout the 1970s and 1980s, local Red Cross committees marked World Red Cross Day by organising gatherings, film screenings, photography exhibitions, and television/radio broadcasts that celebrated the work of local Soviet Red Cross volunteers and their international counterparts.Footnote 132
Conclusion
The relationship between the Soviet Red Cross and the League worked because the two organisations shared a vision of humanitarianism centred upon internationalism and development in the Global South. The Soviet Red Cross and the League had vastly different perceptions of the goals and purpose of the Red Cross movement, but they agreed upon prioritising the development of national health care systems in the decolonising world. Shared visions of humanitarianism enabled the Soviet Red Cross to participate enthusiastically in a non-communist international organisation, despite the various challenges that this participation generated.
Looking between Geneva and Moscow offers fresh insight to the global history of humanitarianism in showing how the Soviet Union was not a peripheral actor, but instead an important link in the global chain of humanitarian aid and a trusted partner within multilateral humanitarian networks. More broadly, in the context of the Cold War, collaboration between socialist states and international organisations was essential for the delivery of humanitarian aid and health care. Exploring the contours of the mutually beneficial relationship between Moscow and Geneva allows us to rethink the spatial dynamics and relationships of the Cold War era, as well as the ‘plurality of socialist globalisations’.Footnote 133 The international Red Cross movement both reinforced and blurred Cold War bipolarity in providing a bridge between socialists in the East and South, as well as a way for Soviet citizens to imagine themselves as part of a global community that transcended political divisions. The circulation of humanitarian aid shows how international organisations headquartered in the capitalist West could be important nodes in the global networks connecting socialist projects across the world.
Acknowledgements
This research was generously supported by the Wellcome Trust under grant 224717/Z/21/Z. I would like to thank Sarah-Joy Maddeaux and Grant Mitchell at the IFRC Archives in Geneva for their help in accessing the archive’s collections and reproducing materials. Thanks also to the JGH editors, especially Heidi Tworek, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and critiques. I am very grateful to Alison Bennett, Freddy Foks, Laura Forster, Thom Loyd, Samuel O’Connor Perks, Stefan Ramsden, Aleksei Titkov, Alexandr Voronovici, and Talia Zajac for commenting on the first draft. An early version of this work was presented to students enrolled on the LEAP programme in Humanitarian Practice at the University of Manchester’s Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute and I am enormously thankful to the group for their thought provoking questions and helpful comments.
Financial support
The research for this article was supported by the Wellcome Trust (grant 224717/Z/21/Z).
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Siobhán Hearne is a historian of the Soviet Union and a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. Her current project, ‘Red Humanitarianism: The Soviet Red Cross and Public Health, 1953–1991’ explores the meaning and scope of medical volunteerism in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. She is the author of Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2021), and her work has appeared in the journals Past & Present, Slavic Review, Russian Review, English Historical Review, and the Journal of Social History, amongst others.
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